THE Platonic Dialectċc the Science of Eternal and Immutable Principles, and the method (ὄργανον) by which
these first principles are brought forward into the clear light
of consciousness. The student of Plato will have discovered
that he makes no distinction between logic and metaphysics.
These are closely united in the one science to which he gives
the dame of "Dialectic," and which was at once the science of
the ideas and laws of the Reason, and of the mental process
by which the knowledge of Real Being is attained, and a
ground of absolute certainty is found. This science has, in
modern times, been called Primordial or Transcendental Logic.

We have seen that Plato taught that the human reason is
originally in possession of fundamental and necessary ideas --
the copies of the archetypal ideas which dwell in the eternal
Reason; and that these ideas are the primordial laws of
thought -- that is, they are the laws under which we conceive
of all objective things, and reason concerning all existence.
These ideas, he held, are not derived from sensation, neither
are they generalizations from experience, but they are inborn
and connatural. And, further, he entertained the belief, more,
however, as a reasonable hypothesis1 than as a demonstrable
truth, that these standard principles were acquired by the soul

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